Snippets

Oversubscribed: Tennis players Minnie Driver must be feeling jolly pleased with herself. Only a few months ago, she was despairing of her inability to find a date. Now she has gone and got herself a young hotty, Robby Ginepri, who is not only a fashionable 12 years younger than her (toyboys being the Hollywood accessory du jour) but is also a tennis player. And tennis players are top of every guest list right now: no longer a game for goody-goodies, tennis is getting glamorous. A little Hollywood fairy dust goes a long way, and starlets Kirsten Dunst and Reese Witherspoon both play young tennis champs in upcoming Hollywood productions. (Dunst, who plays a bad-girl virtuoso player in the Wimbledon movie currently being filmed at the All England Club, has been spotted getting into character all over London, jumping up and down to Justin Timberlake records in bars, and falling asleep in taxis on the way home.) Not so long ago, tennis "chic" got no more sophisticated than short skirts and frilly knickers, but with Diane von Furstenberg collaborating with Reebok to create chic outfits (as modelled by Venus Williams at Wimbledon this year), the ball is most definitely in the tennis court. JCM

Overexposed: Hurdy-Gurdy fashion You know, unlike Geoff "Who's da man? Not me!" Hoon, I'm willing to fling up my manicured hands and cry mea culpa. Perhaps my mind is simply too narrow to comprehend why designers think women should look like Humpty Dumpty (pre-fall) this season. It's the coats, you see, with their overly bulked shoulders and weird cropped cuts, making a woman look like she is about to break out in a hurdy-gurdy jig. At Stella McCartney and Costume National, coats are sliced up to the sternum with exaggeratedly rounded shoulders; it's a similar story at Louis Vuitton, while Sportmax does no good to anyone by puffing its sleeves out with fur and Dolce and Gabbana goes for the unbalanced Michelin Man look with cropped puffa jackets. But the ruling empire of hurdy-gurdiness is Balenciaga, where leather jackets are not only cropped but the sleeves are cut in a rigidly rounded shape, so if you bend your knees a little and give a wee snarl, you'll resemble that photo of "Governor" Arnie Schwarzenegger displaying his muscles in his glory days of yore, which may well be a temptation to the folk of California but I think I'll bow out of this one, myself. Hadley Freeman

Overheard: "The Kate debate" Apropos of last week's internet discussion about whether la Moss is bad for her friends' marriages, and this week's rumours about the alleged Bobby Gillespie/Kate Moss/Katie England (aka Gillespie missus) triangle, eg "So is Miss Moss an evil, friend-back-stabbing man-stealer or is this all scurrilous gossip? Whatever, the Kate debate is the most fun we've had since Nicole and Jude!"

Pretend you know all about: The perfect cup of coffee Back in the old days, coffee-speak was simple: there was black or white, sugar or no sugar. Then we learned coffee-bar pidgin Italian (cappuccino, espresso, macchiato). And then came Starbucks-speak (skinny, no-fun, no-whip, soy latte to go). And still the lifestyle learning curve swoops ever upward: Calvin Klein, the maestro of bossy Manhattan-esque urban chic, has upped the stakes yet again with the revelation that he has a pale-brown square cut out from a paint chart taped above the coffee machine in his office to demonstrate to his minions the exact shade they should be aiming for when mixing coffee and milk. Genius! How else to ensure that your morning cup strikes the perfect balance between your chocolate suede jacket and your cream cashmere turtleneck? Who cares about the flavour, as long as it looks right? How fabulously fashion! What's more, I spy a lifestyle marketing opportunity: can a Calvin Klein Homewares Double Roasted Espresso Gloss paint range be far off? Watch this space. JCM

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Snippets

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.26 EDT on Friday 29 August 2003.
It was last modified at 06.26 EST on Friday 4 November 2005.
It was first published at 06.26 EST on Friday 4 November 2005.